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Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas‘: HERE.
The Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, has called for the removal of a mural of Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukrainian refugee whose brutal murder was caught on video, because, according to Mayor Smiley, because of its “misguided, isolating intent”.
Providence has a BLM street mural covering three blocks and a “Love is a Many Gendered Thing” mural, but Mayor Smiley urged supporting artists “whose work brings us closer together rather than divide us” and remembering Irina’s murder divides us.
Unlike BLM and “Love is a Many Gendered Thing” which bring us together.
In New York City, a mural of the murdered woman was vandalized after being up for less than two weeks. In Chicago, it was vandalized in less than a month.
But not all murals and acts of iconoclasm are created equally or treated equally.
Over in Milwaukee, a 74-year-old rabbi was sentenced for vandalizing a terrorist mural depicting the Star-of-David as a swastika. According to media reports, the Muslim ‘artist’ had to be removed from the courtroom after he “acknowledged his support for Hamas”.
People have gone to prison for driving over street BLM and LGBTQ murals while radical mobs have become heroes for tearing down Civil War statues and Columbus monuments. Write “Black Pre-Born Lives Matter” outside Planned Parenthood and you will be arrested, but scrawl “Black Lives Matter” and “Defund the Police” and you’ll get a grant. The two-tier culture war politicisation applies to our monuments and murals.
In D.C., ‘preservationists’ have expressed outrage and fought legal battles with the Trump administration over the White House State Ballroom, Eisenhower Office Building, and the Kennedy Center renovations. The latest such lawsuit comes from a coalition that includes the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, the DC Preservation League and Cultural Heritage Partners who are complaining that the ugly seventies modernist mausoleum is “an iconic architectural treasure” whose structures “carry cultural and symbolic significance far beyond the nation’s capital.”
Where were these ‘preservationists’ when radical mobs were tearing down statues and monuments over a century old? They were cheering them on.
The National Trust not only backed taking down Confederate monuments, but actually cheered on the vandalism of the statue of Francis Scott Key, the writer of the poem that became America’s national anthem, while falsely claiming that the lines of the full poem, “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave/And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave/O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave” were racist. Any actual historian knows that this was a reference to mercenaries and ‘impressed’ sailors, forced to serve, a major cause of the conflict.
Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm, previously bragged that “we proudly represent clients who seek to have monuments removed from public lands, relocated, or recontextualized in order to be able to tell fully truthful history and create a more inclusive future.” Cultural Heritage Destruction Partners might be more accurate.
The DC Preservation League announced that it was “committed to the struggle for racial justice” by which it meant that “while some monuments are longstanding elements of historic landscapes or exemplify the work of master artists and craft persons, they may reinforce past values and ideologies which are repugnant today, and their continuing display in public spaces may be unacceptable.” Examples of monuments it opposed included the statue of Andrew Jackson and the Emancipation Memorial, known as the original Lincoln Memorial, showing President Abraham Lincoln freeing a slave.
According to the very selective preservationists, the Kennedy Center, dating back to the seventies, is a national treasure, but an 1876 statue of Lincoln ending slavery isn’t.
The monuments and the murals that are kept and those being destroyed have nothing to do with art, historicity or a respect for the past, only a culture war being fought for the future. This culture war flies the false flags of “inclusivity” with the vandals claiming that they are out to preserve inclusive art, as Mayor Smiley put it, those “whose work brings us closer together rather than divide us”, but it’s not about bringing us closer together.
The two-tier enforcement of public art is like everything else about the triumph of a cultural narrative. Much like the ancient pharaohs and caesars of old who vandalized old monuments to make way for the new, their idea of art is all about power. That their preferences end up upholding concrete ugliness, like the Kennedy Center, over classic statuary, is a symptom, and not an unintentional one, of the aesthetics of their politics.
Art is memory and they would rather that we remember George Floyd as an innocent victim of the police, rather than as a violent thug who robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint, and they would rather that we not remember Iryna Zarutska or innocent crime victims at all. Columbus, Washington and Jefferson must go, but these days so must the statues of Cesar Chavez, because the power to erase the past is also the power to control the culture. Regular cultural cleansings, justified or not, put the ‘party’ in control of collective memory, constantly deciding what gets to stay and what must be purged.
The art that truly moves us isn’t political, but art has become infected with power.
Art talks to us about love, heroism and beauty. It asks us what we love and what we want to be. But in this Orwellian culture, everything, especially culture, is reducible to power. Art becomes ugliness. A means of bullying the public with the party’s repetitive slogans. History is constantly being warped by an ideology that constructs new narratives on top of the old. Art used to be inspiring: it’s now depressing. A radical movement incapable of celebrating anything except its own ideology has seized control of our culture. It doesn’t make art, all it does is make ideological idolatry.
And the right of the iconoclast, the monopoly on cultural violence, it reserves for itself.
Good analysis…
Yes, good article on the ugliness of left-wing hatred.
The left has embraced Islam not realizing that Islam does not and will not embrace them.
I thought dumbass leftists were all down for Ukraine/Ukrainians.
Had that poor girl been murdered by someone wearing a MAGA hat, their position on Iryna would be far less hostile.
Leftist hypocrites are simply put off that her story exposes their core destructive idiocy.
Our murals are given to actual innocent victims.
Leftist murals are always dedicated to low-life fools – usually engaged in criminal activity.
Yes. Leftist’s are for Ukrainians. The exception is when a black murders them.
Leaving up a mural of Iryna brings attention to the fact that a black man stabbed her to death. We can’t have that. The 85-90% black on white interracial crime in the US has to be covered up. Remember, blacks are the perpetual victims here; not the innocent white female who had her life taken from her.
But Greenfield, how do you write during Passover? Is it already sunset down south? It takes the Sun longer to go down up here in San Jose.
Brilliant article with this events happening right under our noses. but didn’t think as deeply about it until I read your compilation..
I fret over every murder I see when watching the news. I’m still not that numb or jaundiced when I hear and see these horror stories they stick in my heart
But for whatever reason the murder of Iryna Zarutska stayed with me and in my conscience.
It’s something you can’t un see. That little innocent. Fawn being slaughtered in a near fetal position, it haunt me to this day knowing the horrible moment, she must’ve felt when turning her head..
I’m moved to see people remembering her with murals.
Thank you for putting it all together ,again brilliant so worthy I wish everyone could read this
Leftists deface her murals and want to take them down because Iryna Zarutska is a reminder of their own disastrous social justice policies. Iryna’s killer had 14 convictions including armed robbery. Any reasonable system would have kept him out of the public, but Charlotte NC, like many US cites had cashless bail and a social justice infected criminal justice system that valued optics and political correctness over public safety. The tattooed dreadlocked predatory killer slit her throat, stabbed her breast and her knee, looked down at her, and then walked away saying “We got that white girl”. Everything about this story is an indictment of their world view and their agenda.
I know it’s not the main point here, but my God that young woman was beautiful, as if someone took the Bambi character and made it human. Truly model material. Who knows what her life could have been?
I swear, the level of unbridled hatred that much (most?) of the left now has for this country, and for western civilization itself, is now so great and terrible that compromise of any kind is likely no longer possible. The least damaging solution may well be a messy, but relatively peaceful partitioning of the land. I try not to think about it.
Good article illustrating the plague of hate that has taken over the country.
What happened to this young innocent woman, Iryna Zarutska is even worse the tragic. She was minding her own business, not bothering anyone. When that vicious criminal thug came up be hide her and without warning maliciously murdered her, in cold blood.
To make matters even worse, the leftist in power in the city said that they “Aren’t sure of his motive.”
Those be in strong politically correct or deliberately to hide the truth from the public, because after that hooligan murdered her, he bragged out, with demonic glee loud “I killed a White girl.”
That murderer from his own, wicked, mouth made it clear what his motivation was. It was a racially motivated. Therefore, he be changed with a race hate crime. In addition to murder charges.
Nevertheless, it’s very unlikely that hate crime charges be filed against him because the diabolical politically correct philosophy has terribly infected the legal system and likewise the US courts.
The reader may be sure that if a White thug murdered a Black woman, hate crime charges would certainly be filed against his in addition to murder charges. As they should be
The point is that PC corrupted law system is unfair unjust and wrong. The have genuine race equality. Not double standards.
In addition, the left- wing new media would, with doubt widely publicize a murder if it was a White who murder a Black, yet since this was Black murderous a White person it will not be well publicized.
If a White thug murdered a Black woman would the leftist media widely publicize that deadly incident but also there would be many Black race riots in different cities across the United States.
That murderer was crybaby when he, rightly, and justly received the death penalty in court for his criminal vicious unprovoked malicious murder of the defenseless young White woman , Iryna Zarutska
This is a reflection of the information provided in the Bible, which reveals men who wicked criminal actions should be afraid law authorities are appointed by God to punish evil doers. In contrast, people who live law abiding peaceful lives have nothing to fear from the authorities and enforcer of the law, Romans 13:11-4.
Mayor Smiley is a dick. And I say this as a socialist who sometimes visits this site. Not to troll but to check out conservative opinion.
Behind their phony high-minded platitudes lies their true nature. The people belonging to the DC Preservation League are part of the left-wing fascists of today. I’m betting the kind of art that appeals to them is same style of propaganda posters that came out of Germany and Italy of the 1930’s.